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78

Gamezilla

Ten years have past and the controversial series has made its way to the Game Boy Advance. Tagged with the Mature moniker, Midway’s Mortal Kombat Advance for the GBA is a faithful port of the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 version. But is it for everyone? If you loved the Mortal Kombat movies, then you will cherish this game. If you loved the Mortal Kombat games and need that Fatality fix, you will enjoy the GBA version. If you cannot place yourself in either category, please move along. Overall, the controls are great, the graphics are poor and the sound effects are excellent. For the diehards, habits die hard. For the non-Kombatants, thank you for reading and please move along.

There were a ton of great games ported to the Game Boy Advance last year. From Klonoa and Castlevania, to Street Fighter and Tony Hawk 2, the Game Boy Advance was the only system other than PlayStation 2 that offered games from almost every major developer. Shortly before Santa brought us our gifts and made everyone smile, Midway shipped one last game that would surely be stuffed in more than a few thousand stockings -- Mortal Kombat Advance.

I’m not sure who dropped the ball on this one. Either Midway forced Virtucraft to push this title out the door in time for the Christmas shopping season, or perhaps Virtucraft simply isn’t capable of programming for the GBA. Everything was there, in place, to make a potentially great game. Mortal Kombat Advance is a textbook example of how to take a proven successful franchise and destroy it with a single poor release.

The ESRB Mature rating will tell you there's blood. The screenshot will tell you it looks good on Game Boy Advance. However, it takes yours truly to tell you that Mortal Kombat plays like butt on the GBA. All the fighters, fatalities, and arcade accuracy in graphics and sound won't make up for the krummy kontrols. Timing is way off. Leg sweeps, one of the game's best strikes, are too hard to pull off, as are many special moves. MK Advance may look GBA, but it plays GBC, and that's the killer.

The Game Boy Advance is home to a great number of ports and/or updates, which in my experience seems to frustrate a lot of gamers. It's fine by me though, provided the games are good and still worth playing. Why then did Midway bother to release this highly disappointing 'effort' (I say that in the lowest sense of the word)? Let's find out...

Mortal Kombat Advance (MKA)… what do you say when one of the most popular fighting game franchises of all time comes to the newest handheld platform? Well, most likely you have your own opinions, but even if you take a look at the game based on its own merits rather than the past history of the series, and you take into consideration that it's on the GBA, then you come up with a game that's still mediocre at best.

Mortal Kombat Advance is a case of failed execution. It looks and sounds like Mortal Kombat, but it doesn’t play like Mortal Kombat. The horrible AI and wonky controls result in extremely stiff gameplay. The bottom line: this is one fight you’ll want to avoid.

Nintendo's Game Boy Advance has been an extremely fertile breeding ground for remakes of popular games from the past. As the remakes begin to pile up, more and more companies are getting on the rerelease train, hoping to cash in on their back catalog of products. Midway has already released a collection of old arcade games for the system, and now the company has released a version of Mortal Kombat for the GBA. The resulting product looks and sounds OK, but the gameplay is so astoundingly awful that even the most die-hard MK fan should stay far, far away.

Life is a game. Death... that's just a matter of hitting the right button and joystick combination at the right time. Ever since Scorpion first raised the hood to reveal he and Skeletor shared the same deadbeat dad, Mortal Kombat players have operated under this rule. Nowadays, though, they've also had to accept another given fact--each new series installment blows more chunks than the last, if that's humanly possible. Apparently so, as the first Game Boy Advance incarnation proves. Yes, folks, it isn't merely "asstastic," but a complete embarrassment as well. Call the lackluster AI and lousy control system disappointing if you will; we experts prefer to think of them merely as Shao Khan's latest evil handiwork. And, if Midway has any dignity left, they'll adopt that stance in public too.

From the bloodless SNES port of the original Mortal Kombat to the excellent N64 port of Mortal Kombat 4 by Eurocom, the series has been played on almost every console available. Unfortunately, not every port has been so successful. The latest version of Mortal Kombat comes to the Game Boy Advance, courtesy of Midway. Regrettably, their effort with this port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 falls into the latter category.

Mortal Kombat Advance is full of problems, the biggest one being its core gameplay. Getting past this issue in an effort to enjoy this game seems impossible, much like getting past each of the opponents on Grand Master. Despite having more than 20 characters from the Mortal Kombat series, none of them do the trick in shelling out the fun factor. It must be said that this Kombat doesn’t even Kome Klose.

If you're a game developer, and you've been assigned the task of porting an established brand to a very capable system, here's a rule of thumb: get it right. Believe me, if the game is a popular one, gamers are going to notice when something's not pulled off exactly as it had been in previous incarnations. But when you get it completely wrong, there's going to be trouble. And brother, Mortal Kombat Advance is definitely the worst port of the series performed on capable system hardware. If there was ever a game that just screamed "rush job," it's this fighter published by Midway. It's absolutely embarrassing to see just how botched MK is on the handheld.